- Author
- Not stated (published on the overreacted blog)
- Published
- 21 October 2025
- Kind
- Personal blog post, one worked debugging case
- Original
- overreacted.io/how-to-fix-any-bug/
- Subject
- Coding with agents
What it is
The post is a first-person account on the overreacted blog. The author was building a small app with Claude. A server call broke scrolling. The post records the fix attempts and turns them into a general process.
What it says
- The post says Claude kept declaring the bug fixed without a repro it could check.
- The author says a repro can be swapped for a simpler one tracking the bug.
- A narrowed repro needs a check: a known fix for the bug should pass it.
- The author describes removing code and rerunning the repro, committing only while the bug persists.
- The post says Claude drifted into testing theories and built repros lacking the bug.
- The root cause was an old React Router bug that ran ScrollRestoration on every revalidation.
What evidence it gives
The evidence is one worked case. It includes the author's instructions, Claude's own summary output, and the final root cause. The author also cites a week spent deleting half of Facebook's React tree. The final repro there was about 50 lines. There are no measurements across many bugs.
Interests and limits
The author does not name themselves on the page. The case is a single front-end bug and a single Claude session. Claude did not find the root cause; the author did after Claude narrowed the code. The post says the method is effective but does not test it against other methods.